WA’s First Charter School Risks Closure

Just months after it opened, First Place Scholars, the first charter school in Washington state, is in turmoil.

Its first principal resigned in November, more than half of its original board of directors have left, too, and the state’s charter-school commission has identified more than a dozen potential problems that need to be fixed soon if the school wants to keep its doors open.

[…] First Place was the first charter to open in part because it wasn’t starting from scratch. It had long been a private elementary school, founded to serve homeless students, in partnership with Seattle Public Schools.

To be clear, First Place Scholars had been successfully serving homeless students for years as a privately funded not-for-profit. As a charter school it got to replace its private charitable funding with state and local tax dollars, allowing it to more than double its capacity to up to 100 students. But the transition has not gone smoothly.

I sincerely doubt the state’s charter school commission—packed with charter school advocates—would allow First Place to close. They have too much at stake here. But First Place’s journey from successful private school to flailing charter certainly belies the notion that charter schools are somehow magically efficient.

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I provided mandated therapy at a charter school in AZ. After seeing the operation it became obvious a charter school is no better nor worse than the public, it’s just another choice. Because it was smaller it did have some advantage of not being as battered by bureaucracy but was not devoid of operational malady. In the end a charter school is just another school. And the argument of the charter system taking money from the public system does have validity. After working at one I don’t see the promoted advantage.

The advantage is not in efficiency. The advantage should be in two things: 1. an increase ein choices, leading to a competition. As an economic model we know this works. NIH grants are based on this model and operate wonderfully to create divers approaches to science because scientists will work harder for grant finds then they will for salaries. 2. a greater involvement of the school community .. call it buy in.

On telling number is at the high school level where major cities, with Seattle as an exception, offer competitive and divers high schools. Some of these are called charters, but they all offer a great deal of local governance. The argument against this that such schools weaken schools that do not cater to the elite, but I have no found any evidence that the average kid does worse because these schools exist.

The choice of First Place to begin the charter movement here is interesting because it is so explicitly aimed at the most needy kids. While one can look at these administrative issues and say tsk tsk, the experiment .. increasing the numbers served while replacing charity funds with pubic funds to serve very needed kids seems well worth the effort.

It’s obvious that the charter school system is broken and should be supplemented, if not replaced, by an auxiliary layer unbeholden to the parent layer. That is, the charter school system no longer serves the individual needs of the community and ought therefore to be charterized, (fans of fractal geometry ought to consider investing in single student school rooms, often known as ‘home schooling’, also known as ‘sociopath schooling’)

First Place hit its first bump when Halsey sat in on a board meeting in September and noticed the board went into executive session, saying they wanted to discuss personnel matters, which is appropriate, but also “other” issues, which is not a legal reason for public boards to meet in private.

During that visit, Halsey noted more than a dozen ways that First Place appeared to be out of compliance with what it had promised in its charter contract.

..no documentation of any teacher’s certification

Among the most pressing issues for Halsey was the lack of a teacher with training in special education, given that nearly 20 percent of the school’s students need those services. Earlier in the school year, a contractor was helping those students, but she left Oct. 29. Federal law requires that disabled students get the services they need.

Ah, maybe First Place should be put on hold until they get their act together.

And maybe the charter schools coming on line in the next year or two should be monitored closely since First Place is the poster child in this state and yet it is fucking up badly.

One might even argue that it is performing much worse than the Obamacare web site we should scrap the whole idea of charter schools because they are a waste of tax payers money.

Since this ‘private’ charter school receives all of its money from the government, it should be subject to governmental supervision of some sort. All it will take to unmask this ‘private’ ruse will be when something goes horribly awry and government is held responsible because of lack of due diligence in providing direction.

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